Much of what we hear, and which sets the terms for the debates that matter to us, comes from a few select voices. News channels, opinion columnists, prolific and well-followed social media commentators — these are the voices which dominate.
There’s an obvious problem with this: the loudest voices, plausibly, aren’t the best voices. Few would disagree, for example, that Fox News is on balance an epistemically bad phenomenon — it lowers the quality of discourse by lying in Racist. Its voice is heard, not because of the quality of its views, but because of the wealth of its owner. The typical opinion column is almost offensively bad because there are few people worth hearing from every week, and because the people who have such cushy jobs almost certainly do so because of who and not what they know. And as for loud mouths on social media — well, there is, in general, little reason to think that wanting to be heard correlates in any interesting way with deserving to be heard. I belong to a discipline — academic philosophy — which is constantly beset by quarrels carried out viciously and typically unproductively on social media by a small handful of people who set the tone while the rest of us watch on in silence.
What to do about this problem? The classical liberal has an idea: we need to combat bad speech with better speech. Fox News may be epistemically harmful, they grant, but preventing them — even were it possible — from speaking wouldn’t be a good thing, either because it infringes liberty, or it gives an allure to bad ideas, or because it sets a dangerous precedent (if preventing speech is okay, what’s to stop the bad guys stopping the good guys from speaking). And their viewpoint could be extended: if old-boys’ clubs typically platform the undeserving, we should create alternative platforms whose superior quality will sell better in the marketplace of ideas, and permit environments in which more people feel able to speak up on social media.
What we can call — tongue in cheek, and for want of a better word — the snowflake left has its doubts about this. They are perhaps more attuned to the power dynamics at work in speech, and more cynical about how they can be overcome. They are more cynical that the billions of dollars behind Fox News can be so easily neutered; more cynical that, even if good ideas do get their time in the sun, they will manage to win over people as they should. They might doubt, for example, that even if an otherwise social media wallflower were to have a decisive interjection to make in an online squabble, that they should, because their more powerful superiors — professors, editors — might hold it against them. If the classical liberal thinks there is a marketplace of ideas, the snowflake left agrees, but then adds — like any other market, it’s deformed by power and resource imbalances that must be fought against. That it’s a market is a bad thing, not a good thing.
While my moral and indeed intellectual sympathies lie with the snowflake left, I think there are problems with its position. I can sum it up quickly. Grant the point made above, that the desire to speak probably doesn’t correlate particularly closely with having things worth saying. If you like that point, you might also like this point: the desire to let others not speak probably also doesn’t correlate with great epistemic merit. Roughly, the problem is this: the snowflake left, more astutely than the classical liberal, realizes the harms of speech and the problem of resource inequality that are tied up with it, but their solution is to control who has access to the platforms, which just moves the bulge of inequality around (from the platformed to the platformers).
Here is the idea I want to develop in this post: instead of either throwing more platforms or controlling who has access to them, we do our best to neuter platforms of their power. A platform is a way of centralizing and controlling attention. In my view, many of the most interesting recent developments in the politico-economic sphere are centered around the idea of decentralizing power, and I want to suggest that the same thing applies here. The hope is that will neuter the root source of the problem that the snowflake left has while still keeping the classical liberal onside. And my thought about how to do this turns not on speech, but on its (seeming) opposite, silence.
The philosopher Eric Swanson has written about what he calls ‘omissive implicatures’. Dejargonized, this refers to the fact that in not saying something, one can serve to communicate. The paper(http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ericsw/research/Swanson, Omissive Implicature.pdf) is fascinating and I highly recommend reading it (if you don’t have the background, skip to the examples starting on page 12, ignoring the theory, then go back and try to parse the first bit.) He points out, for example, that the notable failure of high up Nazis to apologize, when apologies were obviously warranted, subverts conversational expectations and functions as a confusing sort of power play (less weightily, imagine someone close to you hurting you in some way, knowing that they did so, but nevertheless not apologizing. It’s natural to infer that they are thereby getting across that they think they did nothing wrong just as well as if they had outright said ‘I did nothing wrong’).
And he points out how silence can easily lead to complicity. Consider a verbal version of the bystander effect: a racist is abusing someone on the train. People watch uncomfortably; nobody initially speaks up. It continues, and the silence continues. One explanation Swanson suggests is that the each person’s initial silence conveys something to the others that reinforces their silence — it conveys, for example, that maybe the abuser is dangerous, or maybe the case is more nuanced and it’s not clear if one should interject (this is less clear here but more so in variant cases: a father shouting at his son on the subway in a way that seems clearly excessive to you might nevertheless be a case where you and the father just have different but equally acceptable theories of how one should discipline one’s child.) Once these messages are in the air, the pressure against speaking up gets higher, more such messages get generated, in a vicious cycle. I will suggest that a lot of the bad effects of our current intellectual culture arise from these sort of pregnant silences whose implications snowball.
For a final case, Swanson quotes philosopher Charles Mills who points out ways in which what is missing from a given body of work tells us about the priorities of its writers: if it’s missing, it’s easy to think, it’s because these thinkers (often widely recognized as great figures) didn’t view the topic as valuable. Mills is worth quoting here:
Where is Grotius’s magisterial On Natural Law and the Wrongness of the Conquest of the Indies, Locke’s stirring Letter concerning the Treatment of the Indians, Kant’s moving On the Personhood of Negroes, Mill’s famous condemnatory Implications of Utilitarianism for English Colonialism, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’s outraged Political Economy of Slavery? Intellectuals write about what interests them, what they find important, and — especially if the writer is prolific — silence constitutes good prima facie evidence that the subject was not of particular interest.
(Charles Mills, The Racial Contract, p97, quoted in Swanson p18)
Silence matters.
My suggestion is that most of us are heavily involved in omissive implicatures, in some cases this is a moral failing, and were we to speak up at times we are currently silent, the problems mentioned earlier — maybe — would be improved.
In order to see this, note the following. For any platformed opinion, it’s almost certain that there’s a better opinion locked in the mind of someone who encounters it who, either from preference or from circumstance, isn’t able to express that opinion to many. It could be they don’t want to get involved, or they don’t have access to the platform, or they fear more powerful people holding it against them. My thought is that we should devise a mechanism to get that better opinion heard.
And the simple suggestion for how to get those better opinions heard is just to point out to people that, like it or not, by being present to an argument they are contributing to it, even if their contribution consists in silence. Realizing this, and thus realizing that people might attribute to your silence views other than you hold, you should speak up. We should create a norm against taking part in the bad omissive implicatures just as much as there is currently a norm against saying outright bad things.
Here’s how it could go. There’s an argument, with points on both sides. I have something to add — it could be full-throated agreement with one side, a development of something somebody said, or even just — perhaps especially useful — the registering of uncertainty.
In the current system, depending on the circumstance, I’m little motivated to add to the debate. There are several possible reasons for this. I might not want to annoy people on one side, who may be people reviewing my job applications in the future. I might think — though I haven’t seen — the opinion I think is right being presented, so I think it would be redundant. I might think that everybody with whom I’m in contact thinks the same as me so, again, my addition would be redundant.
The problem is that these omissions are ambiguous, and deform, by their absence, debate. Am I not speaking up out of fear, out of agreement, or out of uncertainty? That is very valuable information, and more generally the perspectives of those who are for whatever reason silent are crucial to assessing the epistemic stance of a given group of people.
In the new system, on the other hand, there would be an expectation that one make some sort of contribution. It needn’t be a particularly sophisticated one. For example, a perfectly reasonable contribution might be ‘this is hard, I don’t agree with anyone’. But maybe you do have something to add. Then you add it. Even assuming you’re only connected to (are listened to by) a small handful of people, nevertheless your voice will get heard. And those people are under the same obligation to speak up. They can do so by agreeing with your view, thus further promoting it, disagreeing, ignoring, or again expressing ambivalence or uncertainty.
I hope you can at least see in principle the thinking behind what I’ve said so far: to ensure more measured debates by making as many parties to the debate heard as possible. I’ll consider moral, logistical, and practical problems with this view in a second, but first I want to return to free speech. What, if anything, does this have to do with that debate?
Here’s the thought. In the current system few speak and many listen. Classical liberals want to add slightly to the roster of the few; snowflake leftists want to choose who the few are. The proposal here is that we dilute the power of the few by encouraging the many to speak (and we do so by impressing upon them that their silence speaks just as much words do). Instead of centralized opinion formers and attention receivers, we decentralize things, or rather, we attempt to mitigate the ill effects of centralization by each taking up some commitments to ensuring a good discourse.
Here’s schematically what I mean. Fox News manages to succeed first by lying in Racist, second by getting its viewers to distrust alternative sources of information, and third by taking advantage of the fact that the typical viewer will seldom be exposed to contrary opinions.
What I want to suggest is that the solution is to get them exposed to contrary opinions. But that’s obviously challenging — because of the second point, they will be disposed not to listen to liberal sources or people.
Now here’s a hypothesis: that one interesting source of contrary opinion resides in the heads of the Fox News viewer themselves. Although we might be tempted to have this idea that they are all a basket of deplorables, that probably isn’t true. Assuming just a normal distribution of decentness and credulity among viewers, many probably have their doubts. And then my theory of Fox News is this: it exploits omissive implicatures to make its viewers believe its implausible claims by making them believe that everybody but them in their circle believes its implausible claims.
Fox News says some nonsense. The viewer partly believes it, partly doesn’t. They encounter (only) other Fox News viewers. But — and this is the important bit — like bystanders to a crime, noticing that others don’t express doubts, they don’t express the doubts they have about the more extreme things the reporters say. Each reasons from the others’ silence to an omissive implicature to the effect each given other thinks that Fox News is right, and each, even if they started with reasonable doubts, find those doubts washed away by the corroborative-testimony-by-silence of their peers.
Then the thought would be that in a culture where the true weight of silence were recognised, this wouldn’t happen. The people would feel compelled, or at least not pressured not to, express their true opinions, and thus their doubts about the more outlandish things Fox News says, and thus, without doing anything to prevent Fox News from producing their nonsense, we would have a means to stop people believing it quite so whole-heartedly.
I grant this is controversial, and will consider some objections next. But at least I think it should seem plausible that omissive implicatures have some role to play in the current unhealthy state of public discourse, and that encouraging the silent to speak might have some role to play in diluting the harmful warping of opinion caused by platforms and the platformed.
There’s a lot to object to, and I don’t think I have super compelling responses. This post is more like opening up a region of logical space that, as far as I know, is underexplored, in the hope that views in its vicinity might prove useful. Let me give some reasons to be unsure about what I’ve said, as well as some responses.
So firstly, one might want to press the point that the view developed here doesn’t take sufficient account of the power dynamics of speech.
Everybody, I have suggested, should participate in debates. But that’s awful. Take the academic case: should the person just going on the job market express an opinion they know to be in tension with the views of the people who’ll be reviewing their applications? Academia has enough problems with power imbalances, and this is just going to make things worse.
I definitely see the force of this and don’t want to discount it. But I wonder if there could be a Spartacus effect that would help here. We are rightly worried about putting our head above the parapet because so few do it, so that were we to do so there’s a decent chance we will be noticed. But if everybody were to come out in favour of their view, then perhaps it would be harder to keep track of each person’s perspective (and perhaps the relevant powerful people might come to care less). Secondly, it might be possible, at least in online settings, to offset some of these worries with better institution design. Imagine, for example, that retweets on twitter were anonymous, or that, provided one had a stable identity, one could occasionally tweet anonymously. That might be a way to allow free expressions of opinion without fear of reprisal. (The requirement of a stable identity to back anonymous comments would hopefully prevent Sibyl attacks).
Second, you might think it’s just wildly impractical: there are too many voices and too little time. We just can’t let everybody have their say, because then all we’d be doing is listening to people give their political opinions. That’s fair, but perhaps again better mechanisms, again at least in the online case, might work. Perhaps one could find a way to take a representative sample of opinions and present the parties to the debate with them (perhaps as so: the platform lets everyone express their opinion on a topic and then selects at random a handful to show to everyone, hoping that the randomness will capture the range of ideas.)
Third, this might sound like a terrible idea because most people aren’t particularly well informed or interested in most topics. I’ve foregrounded the idea that those who speak aren’t the best people to listen to, but that could be wrong: maybe those who typically speak are knowledgeable about that they speak about, or at least that those who are silent are typically so because they lack knowledge. In general, you might think allowing everybody to speak would just deluge the discourse with ill-thought-out opinions. Again, solid worry, but recall I said that a perfectly reasonable — indeed, a very useful — opinion to express but that one has little incentive as things stand to express is ambivalence and uncertainty. It seems to be very plausible that injecting more uncertainty into our discussions is a good thing.
There is probably more to object to, but I’ll stop there, hopefully having shown that at least prima facie some of the more obvious problems with this view aren’t necessarily insuperable.
The classical liberal famously thinks there is a marketplace of ideas. As I have presented them, the snowflake leftist thinks (with good reason) exactly, and markets suck. What I’ve tried to do here is effect something of a rapprochement by suggesting a different way the marketplace of ideas could look like, one in which there is no monopoly of opinion-forming power, but rather one in which power is decentralized among all the parties to the debate who have equal opportunity to contribute their ideas, which have been erstwhile suppressed thanks to misunderstandings about the communicative effect of silence, to the market. The solve the problem of free speech, maybe, we need to unlock the power of silence.